Health district, software company work to improve contact tracing process
MOSES LAKE — Grant County health officials are working with a North Carolina software company to streamline and improve the contact tracing process.
“We are working with a software developer called HealthSpace to implement their secure software platform for contact tracing,” wrote Theresa Adkinson, administrator of Grant County Health District, in an email to the Columbia Basin Herald.
Contact tracing — contacting anyone who might have been in contact with someone who has tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus — has been a time-consuming and laborious process, requiring health district staff to make a lot of phones calls and take a lot of notes.
According to Cameron Garrison, director of business development and operations with HealthSpace, the company has created a database that links across devices and allows for much of the information gathered in phone interviews to be collected via a form on a website reached by a link sent by text message.
The short web form asks for your temperature, if you are experiencing any symptoms, if you have any pre-existing medical conditions, if you’ve been out of the house in the past 24 hours, and if so, when and where.
“This allows a health district to send a text to people, gather information in a survey, and make additional contacts if needed,” Garrison said. “It really helps, and a health department is able to increase its ability to contact trace five times.”
Garrison said GCHD has been using an Excel spreadsheet to manage contact tracing. The company’s system is already being used by Okanogan County Public Health, and several other Washington counties are also considering HealthSpace’s software.
The company is looking at a phone app that would use Apple’s and Google’s bluetooth protocols, he said, but the company is not planning on creating an application that would track anyone’s movements.
On May 12, Gov. Jay Inslee said the state Department of Health was working with the University of Washington, and possibly using the Google and Apple protocols, “that could be of assistance to people to find out if they have been in the proximity of people who are infected.”
“No decisions have been made at this time and that if the state ultimately moves forward, use of an app by the public would be completely voluntary and users could opt out at any time,” said Amy Reynolds, a spokesperson for the state Department of Health.
The health district already uses a HealthSpace application to track food permits and restaurant inspections, Garrison said.